The ACLU revived a lawsuit on Thursday that accuses the state of grossly excessive delays to treat defendants deemed incompetent to stand trial, violating their rights to due process and causing them needless suffering.

Federal courts have ruled that defendants deemed incompetent to stand trial should wait no longer than a week to be transferred to state psychiatric hospitals for competency restoration treatment. In Pennsylvania however, defendants typically wait hundreds of days in jails -- and often more than a year -- due to severe bed shortages in its mental health care system.

"It's insane," said Witold Walczak, the legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. "It's hard to overstate how off-the-charts these wait times are in terms of what's happening nationally."

Because of the severity of their conditions, defendants deemed incompetent to stand trial are often held in solitary confinement in county prisons while they await transfer to state psychiatric hospitals. Correctional officials and mental health experts say months of isolation typically cause those defendants to deteriorate further and forces them to serve defacto jail sentences despite not being convicted of their charges.

By comparison, Walczak said, in Alabama, which appears to have the second worst wait times in the nation, incompetent defendants are waiting roughly 200 days for beds.

"Which is really long," Walczak said. "But it's not what we are seeing in Norristown."

Asked for its reaction to the renewed lawsuit, the Department of Human Services said it couldn't comment on the specifics of litigation.

In its settlement with the ACLU last January, the department agreed to create 120 mental health beds. Those beds are less restrictive than its state hospital beds and new and existing patients were rotated into them to ease wait times.

It's unclear why delays in Pennsylvania have worsened despite the addition of those beds.

In an interview with PennLive this past January, one year after the settlement, Dennis Marion, then deputy secretary of the department's office of mental health and substance abuse, speculated that the worsening delays could be due to rising numbers of defendants found incompetent to stand trial or because patients were taking longer to treat.

Walczak said that little had changed since then: the department still doesn't know why wait times are growing.

He said his organization felt forced to return to court because the department appeared unwilling to properly analyze the root of the problem or follow its recommendations to reduce delays.

Now, as part of its renewed injunction, the ACLU is requesting that the court:

Require the department to transfer defendants deemed incompetent to stand trial in no more than seven days.

Order the department to hire an independent consulting firm, answerable to the court, to provide a thorough analysis of its state hospital patients and those on the wait list to determine how to reduce wait-times to no more than seven days.

Order the department to create 100 new mental health beds within the next six months as it awaits the consulting firm to provide recommendations.

Ultimately, Walczak said, action was needed urgently.

As bad as wait times are now, he said, they will likely only worsen in the summer, when traditionally more people enter the criminal justice system.

"It really scares me because it means we are likely to see a spike in the wait list and the wait times," he said. "None of this bodes well."

Editor's note: This story has been updated with a response from the Department of Human Services.